In communication networks, differentiated handling of network traffic may be used to meet requirements with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) depending on the type of network traffic. For this purpose, a forwarding treatment of data packets, i.e., the way of forwarding data packets by a node, may be adjusted so as to obtain a desired QoS level or prioritize certain types of traffic over others.
For example, in mobile communication networks network traffic related to a specific service may be directed to a bearer offering a certain QoS level. In this respect, a bearer is considered to be an information transmission context or path of defined characteristics, e.g. capacity, delay and/or bit error rate. It is possible to establish a number of bearers between a gateway of a mobile communication network and a user equipment (UE), e.g., a mobile phone or other type of mobile terminal. A bearer may carry downlink (DL) data traffic in a direction from the network to the user equipment, and may carry data traffic in an uplink (UL) direction from the user equipment to the network. In the gateway and in the UE the data traffic, which includes a plurality of IP data packets (IP: “Internet Protocol”, which may be the IP Version 4, also referred to as IPv4, or the IP Version 6, also referred to as IPv6) can be filtered, e.g. using IP 5-tuple packet filters, thereby directing the IP data packets to a desired bearer.
However, when performing differentiated handling by directing certain types of data traffic to a corresponding bearer, situations may arise in which available resources are not used in the best way. For example, there may be a situation in which data traffic to be prioritized is assigned to a priority bearer, but using this priority bearer is actually not necessary to achieve a desired Quality of Experience (QoE) at the UE. This may for example be the case if there is a low load in the network.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques which allow for an efficient usage of resources when performing differentiated handling of data traffic.